On 17 October 1978, a newly established taskforce consisting of 59 officers carried out an operation code-named “Cromwell No. 1”. They searched eight sites, namely the residences and companies of a number of persons involved including the chief clerk and the director of the cleaning contractor. All search actions were scheduled to take place at the same time to eliminate the risk of anyone being tipped off.
At precisely the same moment, a group of investigators arrived at the offices of the Telephone Company. The property manager was requested to produce relevant contracts between the Telephone Company and the cleaning contractor. He agreed to do so and instructed the assistant property manager to help find the documents. Later, however, he was to claim that the entire batch of documents in question had been lost and its whereabouts were unknown.
Although the property manager had had the sole safekeeping of these documents, the ICAC obviously could not charge him with losing them! The problem now was how to proceed with investigations given that these documents had gone missing.
Although Cromwell No. 1 had drawn a blank at the Telephone Company as far as evidential clues were concerned, it did succeed in one vital respect. A cleaning company director admitted committing an unlawful act, saying that he had handed five cheques worth a total of $25,000 to the Telephone Company’s chief clerk in a Wan Chai restaurant on 29 July 1978, in return for obtaining Telephone Company cleaning contracts.
The chief clerk was immediately arrested by the ICAC and charged with being a public servant accepting bribes at the Central Magistracy on 20 October of the same year. He was later allowed bail and the case was adjourned to 10 November of the same year.
All this was something of a breakthrough, but the investigators were also following another line, because they continued to believe that the chief clerk was not acting by himself but was a member of a syndicate. In particular, the property manager, as the chief clerk’s supervisor, should have known something of what was happening. The question again arose-how could the ICAC obtain more evidence from this likely mastermind?
Knowing that tough tactics might have little effect on this character, the ICAC played cat and mouse with the property manager over the next few days. Whenever they turned up at Telephone Company premises it was just to collect evidence and documents, never to ask him questions. This psychological warfare soon had the property manager on tenterhooks-as quickly became apparent.
Having first ordered his Filipina helper to make preparations for a big dinner on 24 October, he surreptitiously boarded a flight for London on the night of 23 October.
Just six days after Cromwell No. 1, the property manager seems to have come to the conclusion that flight from Hong Kong was the best way to get out of his predicament - a conclusion which in the long run turned out to be hopelessly false.
The Filipina helper recalled that on 23 October her employer came home from work about 5:30 pm. He and his wife had a cup of tea and they then went out together at about 6:00 pm. She was carrying just a small handbag. The helper thought the two of them had just gone out for a stroll and never expected they would not return.
The decision to flee was almost certainly a very sudden one. The property manager took no luggage with him. He left behind more than 300 items valued at $100,000, including furniture, electrical appliances and costly carpets.
Before he got away, he instructed his lawyer to sell off assets worth around $300,000. To conceal this transaction and facilitate later withdrawals of funds, he asked for the proceeds to be remitted in cash to The Netherlands.
Ms Wan insists that the property manager’s apparent success in escaping did nothing to undermine her team’s confidence in cracking the case. Quite the reverse-his hasty departure only steeled the investigators’ determination to collect the necessary evidence and bring him to book as soon as possible.
As soon as the news spread that the property manager had absconded, speculation on all sides as to the real story was rife. Most to the point, a number of terrified contractors saw that they would likely have to bear all the consequences of their corrupt actions now that their mastermind had skipped town. So they took the initiative to file reports with the ICAC and were soon busy explaining the whole story.
Take for instance the renovation contractor who helped the ICAC locate a diary replete with details of payment and collection of commissions. This contractor had actually been keeping careful records of every project in which he was implicated because he feared that people like the assistant property manager might one day refuse to acknowledge their debts. When the ICAC turned up the heat, each of the contractors involved had been told to destroy all documents-but this particular diary had escaped destruction.
When the investigators were being informed one evening at midnight that this diary was to be found in a house in Sha Tin, they hurried there. But when they entered the house, they discovered piles of ashes everywhere and thought that the diary must have been burnt.
Nevertheless, they persisted in their search, scouring every inch of the house, and their diligence was finally rewarded when they found the diary in the drawer of an old desk.
The decoration contractor also said that he had conspired with the assistant property manager to forge tender documents in a bid to obtain decoration contracts, sometimes exaggerating the project amounts in order to pocket the difference. He also provided a large batch of documentary evidence showing that that the assistant property manager and the chief clerk had both accepted commissions.
Faced with such ironclad evidence, neither the assistant property manager nor the chief clerk could shy away from their corrupt crimes. They had to make a clean breast of everything they knew, which was a great deal!
They predictably stated that they were just the property manager’s middlemen, errand boys who had acted purely on his instructions. They gave a detailed account of how the corrupt syndicate headed by the property manager operated, and expressed their willingness to become prosecution witnesses and testify against him.
Kenny Tso Wai-yan, a then principal investigator who assisted the investigation, says, “This was the first corruption case in public sector where the ICAC used evidence from tainted witnesses. In fact, all of these key prosecution witnesses were tainted.”
How did this criminal consortium manage to cheat the Telephone Company of huge sums?